COMM 2101 FALL EXAM REVIEW

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School

Carleton University

Department

Communication Studies

Course

COMM 2102

Professor

Georgina Grosenick

Semester

Fall

Description

COMM 2101 EXAM REVIEW
Chicago School (school of thought):
- Context: Emergence and development of urbanization, growth of
community, expansion of newspapers and transportation, closing the
frontier
- Goal: Achieve the “organic” or “great community”
o Mass media could support development of new community
- Key Theorists:
o Charles Cooley – modern comm mediums were essential for
structure of new communities
o John Dewey – comm is central to development of self, community,
and democracy (Self, democracy, community, communication)
o George Herbert
o Harold Blumer
o Robert Park: Comm makes possible the unity of social groups
- Key Concepts:
o Looking Glass Self: I am what I think you think I am
o Self: indiv is determined by their experiences and interactions
o Community: necessary if we are going to achieve the best self yo
u can achieve.
o Democracy: form of social organization in which all can realize
their full potential.
o Communication: How ppl interact in public of community
o Symbolic interactionism: indivs develop their concept of the self
through interaction with others (3 key concepts: meaning, language,
thought)
o Generalized other: We come up with understanding of what are
the practices and how we interact in society
 how one thinks one's group perceives oneself etc.
o Urban Ecology (Rob Park): looked at how ppl were associated
with each other and studied them from where they were happening Frankfurt School:
- Context: Nazi assumption of power, acceptance of capitalism and
consumerism
o Concern: rise and acceptance of facism in Europe
- Goal: Uncover what they saw as this totalitarian control in media/cultural
production to encourage change and action – They wanted to show
people what was happening not just say it!
o Focus: Emergence and proliferation of mass culture
- Key Theorists:
o Max Horkheimer -> Dialectic of Enlightenment
o Theodor Adorno -> Dialectice of Enlightenment
o Walter Benjamin -> “Work of Art”
o Herbert Marcuse
- Key Concepts:
o Dialectic of Enlightenment: Debate between science/technology
and enlightenment – Result = enlightenment failed and science
became the authority
o Instrumental Reason: Seeks a specific goal/reason
 “An instrument concerned with instrumentalizing the world to
the advantage of the subject.
o False Needs: True needs are forgotten because false needs are
being created, met and supported by capitalism – Associated with
consumerism
o Commodity Fetishism: Consumer worships money that he used
to pay for the cultural experience more than the experience itself –
object of enjoyment = BUYING
o Culture Industry: infects everything with sameness, results in
repetition, false and temporary pleasure, concerned with
entertainment NOT art
- Criticisms:
o No empirical evidence for theories
o Mass culture is not as homogeneous
o Obscure in expressing ideas
o Pessimism surrounding revolutionary change
o Elitist critique of mass culture Marxism and Political Economy:
- Context: modernity = promise of progress and success – through
capitalism
o Period from industrial revolution to current day
o With emergence of industrialism there was a beliefs in the
economic basis society believe that this would then be good for
society, progressive force, benefitted society and indivs as a whole
o Result = socialism
- Goal: Show how multiple, seemingly unconnected facts of social life
evolved and are ultimately defined by class antagonists
o Studies relationship between power, industrial economy and society
- Key Theorists:
o Karl Marx
o Dallas Smythe: recognized the degree to which comm rules ppl’s
lives and is important to the government’s communication.
- Key Concepts:
o Dialectic Materialism: Process of change and influenced by the
material world – We exists in a cyclical state of being, tied to
material conditions
o Social Theory: Society is progressing to a state of communism –
we are at capitalism moving toward communism
o Economic Theory (Labor & Alienation): labor in capitalist society
didn’t allow freedom for indivs – lead to alienation
 Labor (marx) = creative, liberating, productive force =
• FREEDOM – you are a free person if you have control
over your own labor
o Base and Superstructure: model for understanding (economic)
force in society – Base shapes the structure, superstructure
maintains and legitimates the base.
 Base = mode of production and social order enforcing it
(factory)
 Superstructure = Remainder of society, culture, technology,
etc.
o Hegemony: Idea that lower class doesn’t revolt because they have
become complicit in their own relations of ruling – working class are
stupid – people working under false consciousness
Political Economy: focuses on elite control of institutions and how control
effects other institutions/social practices - 4 characteristics – commitment to historical analysis, commitment to
understanding the broad social totality, commitment to moral philosophy,
commitment to social intervention
- Context: emerged during WW2 & looked at institutions of comm
- Smythe’s Key Concepts:
o Production policies: Quantity & quality, technologies – who owns
them, what are the policies around them that allows them to come
into market
o Allocation Policy: Equality of distribution among indivs – who gets
products, how are they being distributed, equally?
o Capital, organization, and control policy: how do we organize
comm services, under what system, how do we change?
- 3 Categories:
o Commodification: comm practices and techs are commodities in
society
o Spatialization = Globalization
o Structuration: Focus on how comm institutions perpetuate class
divisions
- Contemporary Concerns: Convergence, expanded forms of media,
power relations in new media (does tradition base structure still exist?)
- Limitations:
o Doesn’t recognize diversity of pop culture
o Doesn’t allow for indiv agency
o Concepts of domination and subordination are restricted to class
o Economy isn’t the same as the one Marx wrote out Feminist Theory:
- Goal: Attend to the significance of sexual perspectives in modes of
thought and offer a challenge to the masculine bias
- Key Theorists:
o Simone de Beauvoir – The second sex
o Tuchman – symbolic annihilation
o Judith Butler – Gender performativity
- 3 Waves ostFeminism:
o 1 Wave: Reform of women’s social and legal inequalities –
Achieved suffrage – women’s right to vote (end of wave)
o 2 Wave: Concerned with equal rights for women – “The personal
is political” (control over one’s body, right of female minorities)
 Rose out of the civil rights and anti-war movement
o 3 Wave: Challenge and expand common definitions of gender and
sexuality – the way society thought about gender and sexuality
 Realized that it was societal and cultural (way women were
perceived)
 Against essentialism = women were treated as having all of
the same problems and all oppression was the same
- Liberal Feminism: attempts to remove obstacles for women’s full
participation in public life and seeks to make women equally represented
in society
o Concerned with hyper-sexualization of women in society
o Central to 2 wave
- Radical Feminism: Women’s oppression as a fundamental component of
social organization, there’s an accepted view that men are better than
women
- Post-Modern Feminism: Gender as a construct – culture makes gender
appear natural– we associate men with strong and women with weak
- Key Concepts:
o The Male Gaze (liberal feminism): women are often presented for
male voyeuristic pleasure and reduced to body parts and are
objectified o Symbolic Annihilation (liberal feminism): Women’s voices are
being silenced and there is not the same opportunity for women to
talk and give their position in society – absence in media
 Absence, condemnation and trivialization of women in media
o Dualisms (Bordo) (radical feminism): of side of these equations
are often associated with men and one side associated with women
o Gender Performativity (Judith Butler): Socially constructed idea
of what it means to be masculine and feminine (separate from
biology)
o Hegemonic Masculinity: Masculinity is also a construct
- 3 Themes in Feminist Comm Theory
o Difference: questions political and philosophical basis of difference
between genders and among women
o Voice: Explores access to and contributions in communicative
forums
o Representation: Problematize systems of representation in media
and other forums
- Limitations:
o Ideology is inherently gynocentric – from women’s perspective
o Natural differences between men and women are ignored
o Western forms of feminism assume global experience based on a
white middle-class experience in which gender oppression is
primary Cultural Studies:
- Context: Emergence of CCCS (centre for contemporary cultural studies)
and lack of research surrounding popular and mainstream cultural
products and how they produce meaning for their audience
o Postwar Britain – mass society debates
o Reaction to Frank Leavis literature ‘cannon” – means the most
important works
- Goal: Understand the meaning that indivs create surrounding the cultural
products and activities that they engage with and understand the ideology
inherent to these products and activities
- Key Theorists
o Raymond Williams – Culture is our everyday activities and
practices – it is ORDINARY
o Richard Hoggart – Founded the CCCS and looked at literary
analysis to describe pop entertainment of the working class culture
– NOT elitist
o Stuart Hall – Encoding/Decoding
- Key Concepts
o Culture: culture is ordinary and is something that we participate in
together (Williams)
o Texts: Any signifying practice that creates meaning – contain codes
that can be analyzed as a way of accessing cultural meaning
o Encoding/Decoding: the audience goes through a process of
constructing meaning – message is polysemic – there could be
multiple meanings!
 Preferred/dominant reading: way they wanted you to
understand the message
 Negotiated Reading: receiver has specialized i